The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) operates a society-wide system of tech-enhanced authoritarian governance, facilitated by a sophisticated online censorship apparatus and internet-linked physical surveillance devices, says a new report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
In addition to online repression and surveillance, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has become the world’s primary case study of so-called ‘techno-authoritarianism’, as the CCP increases its grip on power through an expanding and near-ubiquitous physical and digital surveillance apparatus, analysts Daria Impiombato, Yvonne Lau, and Luisa Gyhn write in Surveillance, privacy and agency: insights from China:
ASPI
The surveillance apparatus now blankets the whole country, but there are differences in intensity and deployment between regions. For example, the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in western China has long been subject to party-state authorities’ crackdowns aimed at repressing and culturally-assimilating the local Muslim minorities. That has included a brutal arbitrary detention system and the institution of a more intense surveillance system across the region.
While China’s huge population and local differences make it difficult to make any generalized assessment based on the datasets obtained, deployed platforms can nonetheless add to our understanding of the Chinese population’s views on important and complex issues, adds the report, which echoes research from the National Endowment for Democracy’s International Forum (above). RTWT
@NEDemocracy‘s @ThinkDemocracy hosts a discussion on its forthcoming report, Setting Democratic Ground Rules for AI: Reflections from Civil Society, with @naticarfi @opendatacharter
& @ryanaxios @Axios Global Technology Correspondent. https://t.co/9goQS7yPa2 via @YouTube— Democracy Digest (@demdigest) October 12, 2023
